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John Lydon’s rallying call to youth: ‘Learn how to beat this system intelligently’
02.24.2014
12:48 pm
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It started with a look.

John Lydon was wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt that he had modified to read “I Hate Pink Floyd.” It was this piece of anti-fashion that brought him to the attention of Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, owners of the King’s Road boutique SEX.  Malcolm and Vivienne were conjuring up plans for a new band that would fuse fashion and music, and Lydon’s tee-shirt suggested the right kind of attitude the pair were looking for. Lydon was asked to audition for the band, so he mimed to an Alice Cooper number and won the role of lead singer with The Sex Pistols. He looked the part, you might say.

It may have started with a look, but for John it was never about the image, as he later explained to Melody Maker in 1978:

”The rest of the band and Malcolm never bothered to find out if I could sing, they just took me as an image. It was as basic as that, they really were as dull as that.

“After a year of it they were going ‘Why don’t you have your hair this color this year?’ And I was going ‘Oh God, a brick wall, I’m fighting a brick wall!’”

We all know The Sex Pistols, they were “a damned good band,” as Lydon recalls in this interview from That Was Then This Is Now in 1988, ten year’s after the band’s demise.

“And to be quite frank, how right it was we ended when we did, because it would have been really futile to have continued with it. We all knew that…

“When you feel you’re running out of ideas you must stop, and go onto something else, which is precisely what all of us did.

Lydon went on to form Public Image Limited with Keith Levene (guitar), Jah Wobble (bass), and Jim Walker (drums). PiL was “different,” and “experimental without being arty-farty about it.”

Their first release “Public Image,” partly written while Lydon was in the Sex Pistols, dealt with Lydon’s frustration at being only seen for the clothes that he wore. Lydon has always been aware that he is an individual, and as can be seen from his interview on That Was Then This Is Now—love him or loathe him—he has always been consistent in being true to himself, and saying whatever he thinks.

Such honesty makes Lydon good for quotable sound bytes, which fits well with the format of That Was Then This Is Now, where information was served up like the ingredients of a recipe.

For example, he tells us how he moved to America because of police harassment. His home was raided on four separate occasions, his belongings damaged or destroyed, his pet cat killed by overzealous police dogs.

While next, Lydon tells us how he considers himself to be an Englishman, and resents paying his hard-earned cash in taxes to pay for Fergie’s (Princess Sarah Ferguson) frumpy tents.

However, no matter how funny, amusing, insightful and inspiring the answers, having them all cut together, one-after-another, reveals the problem with That Was Then This Is Now: information is arbitrarily doled out as sound bytes, signposted by graphic captions, with no connective structure other than the answers given by the interviewee. It’s a nice research tool, and certainly one for future biographers and archivists, but the form lacks any sense of engagement between the audience and Lydon, as there is no possibility of knowing how rigorously he was questioned about his life or his beliefs.

Of course, there are plenty of highlights, including Lydon’s rallying call to the teenage viewer about intelligence:

“All kids should learn this in school—this is the weapon the Tories use against you.

“They want to keep you stupid. They want to keep you down.

“If you do not learn how to beat this system intelligently, you never will.

That is the only lesson really in life to learn. Period.”

Recorded in 1988, That Was Then This Is Now presented the great, the good and the oh-no of Punk, New Wave and the New Romantics, discussing their musical careers in entertainment.
 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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02.24.2014
12:48 pm
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‘It’s rubbish’: John Lydon brutally critiques the pop charts on ‘Jukebox Jury,’ 1979
02.04.2014
09:19 am
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In 1979, John Lydon made an unexpected appearance on the goofy Jukebox Jury television panel show. His fellow panelists included Joan Collins and Elaine Paige!

“What sort of music do you personally enjoy?”

“Decent.”

The expression on his face (see above), sums up perfectly, I feel, what most Brits probably think about Noel Edmonds, the host of Jukebox Jury ....
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.04.2014
09:19 am
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Public Image Ltd. asks the ‘lollypop mob’ to send in rare pics and footage for upcoming PiL doc
01.30.2014
12:14 pm
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Earlier today, the people who run the Public Image Limited web presence (I’m doing everything in my power not to say “John Lydon” here) put out a call to the band’s fans for any “never before seen” photographs or video footage for a documentary on PiL that is in the works. If you have anything tasty in that direction, you are urged to get in touch at PiLarchive@gmail.com. The statement indicated that those who contribute footage or pictures that are used in the documentary will be named in the end credits.
 

Calling all PiL fans!

We are in the process of making a comprehensive, career-spanning documentary film about Public Image Ltd. and we would like your help!

We are looking for never before seen photographs as well as film and video footage of PiL and John Lydon from any time period. If you have ANYTHING that you think may be of interest please drop us a note. You will be credited in the end titles if we use your footage.

Do you have a snapshot at The Rainbow on Christmas 1978?

Do you have a photo souvenir of the infamous Ritz riot show? Do you have a picture with or without John showing your injuries after being hit by a flying object!

Did you shoot video of John signing your PiL records at the Monsters of Alternative rock Tour in 1989?

We know PiL fans are most creative people. Your ongoing support is greatly appreciated. We salute you lollypop mob.

If you can help please send us an email to: PiLarchive@gmail.com

Please forward or share this info…

 
Here’s some incredible PiL footage that has been seen before, “Death Disco” from Top of the Pops in 1979:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
PiL rarity ‘Steel Leg Vs. The Electric Dread’ is the missing link between ‘First Issue’ & ‘Metal Box
Post-Pistols, pre PiL: John Lydon interview, 1978

Posted by Martin Schneider
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01.30.2014
12:14 pm
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John Lydon visits his childhood home
12.11.2013
09:55 am
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This brief clip from 2009 appeared on the BBC1 magazine program The One Show. John Lydon took part in a recurring series in which prominent Britons visit the residences in which they grew up. Lydon/Rotten lived at 6 Acres Estate in Finsbury Park, London, between the ages of 11 and 20.

The onetime scourge of all right-thinking people notes the improved appointments and fixtures in the humble flat; reminisces about Sid the hamster, who bit the finger of the young John Simon Ritchie, thus ensuring himself a place in the annals of hamster history; and points out the corner of the kitchen where he wrote, “in one go,” one of the most famous songs of the twentieth century—“God Save the Queen.” 
 
John Lydon childhood photo
 
Take solace, younger readers suffering under totally unfair music volume restrictions, the neighbors both upstairs and downstairs detested the Beefheart and reggae Lydon liked to play.  Lydon appears to be quite emotionally affected by the visit, noting that the memories from all different times are “fairly flooding my head right now—and it’s not a pleasant feeling,” followed up with a classic Lydon cackle of displacement. Back in the studio with Adrian Chiles and Christine Bleakley, Lydon again professes to be choked up by the footage. (Adding to this is the fact that his father had died in that housing estate only one year earlier.) 
 
Lydon on The One Show, December 4, 2009:

 
You can see the same apartment in Julien Temple’s The Filth and the Fury—in this clip we get some home footage of Lydon’s mum Eileen around the 5:45 mark, joined by two of Lydon’s younger brothers, Martin and Bobby, around the 7:50 mark:
 

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Growing Up Rotten: Pictures of a young John Lydon
Post-Pistols, pre PiL: John Lydon interview, 1978

Posted by Martin Schneider
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12.11.2013
09:55 am
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John Lydon reveals Mick Jagger ‘secretly’ paid Sid Vicious’ legal fees
11.08.2013
01:15 pm
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John Lydon may have said The Rolling Stones looked “silly” performing at Glastonbury earlier this year, but the former Sex Pistol and PiL frontman has only praise for Mick Jagger.

In an interview with the Daily Record, Lydon has revealed that Jagger ‘secretly’ paid Sid Vicious’ legal fees, after the Pistol’s bass player had been charged with the murder of girlfriend Nancy Spungen. As Lydon told journalist John Dingwall of the Record:

“Nancy Spungen was a hideous, awful person who killed herself because of the lifestyle and led to the destruction and subsequent death of Sid and the whole fiasco. I tried to help Sid through all of that and feel a certain responsibility because I brought him into the Pistols thinking he could handle the pressure. He couldn’t. The reason people take heroin is because they can’t handle pressure. Poor old Sid.

“Her death is all entangled in mystery. It’s no real mystery, though. If you are going to get yourself involved in drugs and narcotics in that way accidents are going to happen. Sid was a lost case. He was wrapped firmly in Malcolm’s shenanigans. It became ludicrous trying to talk to him through the drug haze because all you would hear was, ‘I’m the real star around here’. Great. Carry on. We all know how that’s going to end. Unfortunately, that is where it ended. I miss him very much. He was a great friend but when you are messing with heroin you’re not a human being. You change and you lose respect for yourself and everybody else.

“The only good news is that I heard Mick Jagger got in there and brought lawyers into it on Sid’s behalf because I don’t think Malcolm lifted a finger. He just didn’t know what to do. For that, I have a good liking of Mick Jagger. There was activity behind the scenes from Mick Jagger so I applaud him. He never used it to advance himself publicity-wise.”

Read the whole interview here.

Below, Sid Vicious near last TV appearance on Efrom Allen’s Underground NY Manhattan Cable show from September 18th, 1978. Vicious appeared alongside Nancy Spungen, Stiv Bators and Cynthia Ross (of The B Girls). Spungen was dead less than a month later.
 

 
Via the Daily Record

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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11.08.2013
01:15 pm
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John Lydon almost joined Devo in 1978? Well, I’ll be.
10.10.2013
11:25 am
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Mark Mothersbaugh by Brad Elterman.
 
It’s hard for me to imagine anyone but Mark Mothersbaugh doing the lead vocals for Devo, but did you know that for about ten minutes in 1978 there was a real possibility of John Lydon taking over the singing duties for Devo? (Actually, that’s not quite accurate—he was still known as Johnny Rotten then; there was no such thing as Public Image Ltd yet.)

The story comes from Mothersbaugh, who’s told it many times—if interviewers ask him about it, he’s just as happy to tell it all over again. I first encountered it in Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen’s We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold Story of L.A. Punk:
 

Richard Branson called me up in Akron in the winter of 1978 and said, “Hey, you wanna come down to Jamaica?” And I looked out the window and said to myself, “Well, it’s snowing about thirty inches here. Sure, I’ll come down to Jamaica.” So he flew Bob Casale and I down there to meet him and Ken Berry. We were all just sitting around in the Kingston Holiday Inn and he brought out this big stash of pot and Branson is rolling these gigantic joints on a newspaper and we’re used to being in Akron where you get enough to make a paper-thin joint. We were talking to him about playing Mabuhay Gardens the night after the Sex Pistols’ last show at Winterland and how we were staying over at Search and Destroy magazine, we were using Search and Destroys for mattresses. And we talked about how the Sex Pistols came over to the office, Sid and Nancy, and we were hanging out. And Branson said, “What do you think of them?” And we said, “They were all nice guys. You know. It was fun meeting them. It’s too bad that they broke up.” And Branson said, “I’ll tell you why you’re here. Johnny Rotten is down here at the hotel. He’s in the next room, and there are reporters downstairs from the New Musical Express, Sounds, and Melody Maker. I’d like to go down to the beach right now, if you’re into this, because Johnny Rotten wants to join your band … and I want to announce to them that Johnny Rotten is the new lead singer for Devo.” And I’m going, “Oh my God, I’m really high right now.” Regrettably, I didn’t just go, “Yeah, sounds great. Send him to Akron. He can do it for a week or two, just for the hell of it.” It was a weird time for us.

 
The Mothersbaugh-Lydon connection doesn’t stop there, though. Apparently Mothersbaugh was instrumental in guiding Lydon in the eventual direction of PiL. In some versions of the story, Mothersbaugh goes on to explain that, since they were all high and all, he and Casale were laughing manaically, and in between bouts of laughter proposed to Branson that they help Lydon figure out his next combo instead: “We just started laughing at them until tears were coming out of our eyes and we were choking, and we’re like, ‘It’s not you, Richard. We’re not laughing at you. We love Johnny Rotten. That’s great. But what if we just help him start a band.’” 

There may be something to this. Many have noted the complete tonal switch that existed between the Sex Pistols and PiL, and the more austere critique/adoption of the corporate ethos does seem right out of Akron, as it were.
 
Public Image Ltd.
 
In Apocalypse Jukebox: The End of the World in American Popular Music, Edward Whitelock relates an anecdote from Jade Dellinger and David Giffels’ We Are Devo!: Are We Not Men?,
 

The story concerns a conversation between Mothersbaugh and Johnny Rotten, shortly after the breakup of the Sex Pistols. Mothersbaugh “suggested that Rotten lose the safety pins and shredded shirts and adopt a corporate approach, that screwing with convention was edgier than spitting at it. Perhaps in response, Rotten dropped his stage name and John Lydon formed Public Image Ltd., defining the post-punk aesthetic in the process.” Exactly how much “credit” Mothersbaugh should get for PiL is beside the point, which is that overorthodox thinking had already become second nature for Mothersbaugh and Casale.

 
To me the whole thing is fascinating—Lydon’s early interest in Devo, Branson’s insatiable drive to make something happen, Mothersbaugh’s half-conscious (and probably correct) rejection of the idea.

Would the world never have heard of Jah Wobble? Would Lydon really have participated in the soundtrack to Dr. Detroit?

Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Devo: Something For Everybody!
DEVO light switch plate made of LEGO pieces

Posted by Martin Schneider
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10.10.2013
11:25 am
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Siouxsie, Morrissey, John Lydon, Robert Smith and more get superhero makeovers
05.16.2013
11:40 am
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Brazilian designer Butcher Billy re-imagines Siouxsie Sioux, Mark Mothersbaugh, Ian Curtis, John Lydon, Morrissey, Robert Smith and Billy Idol as comic book superheroes. His series is called The Post-Punk / New Wave Super Friends.

Now only if there was a Mark E. Smith one. He’d probably have to be a supervillain, tho…
 

 

 
More after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.16.2013
11:40 am
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John Lydon’s handwritten rant to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, 1996
05.08.2013
10:25 am
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John Lydon’s handwritten response to the U.S. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame regarding the induction of the Sex Pistols in 1996:

Next to the SEX-PISTOLS rock and roll and that hall of fame is a piss stain. Your museum. Urine in wine. Were not coming. Were not your monkey and so what? Fame at $25,000 if we paid for a table, or $15000 to squeak up in the gallery, goes to a non-profit organisation selling us a load of old famous. Congradulations. If you voted for us, hope you noted your reasons. Your anonymous as judges, but your still music industry people. Were not coming. Your not paying attention. Outside the shit-stem is a real SEX PISTOL

Via The World’s Best Ever and Letters of Note

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.08.2013
10:25 am
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Growing Up Rotten: Pictures of a young John Lydon
04.30.2013
11:16 am
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Photographs of John Lydon from cute, tartan-clad child, via brainy school portrait, to long-haired, teenaged hippie, who was going to Hawkwind concerts and allegedly selling LSD.
 
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Via The Times, Stereogum, Fodderstompf, and Fark
 
More of young Master Lydon, after the jump…
 

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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04.30.2013
11:16 am
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Something rotten Down Under: John Lydon makes a fool of himself on Australian TV
04.10.2013
04:09 am
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Yesterday John Lydon threw a hissy fit on Australian TV talk show The Project and ended up the fool. Looking like a pudgy old tart with a stick up his arse, Lydon’s rant was bereft of even the slightest trace of humor or punkish charm. It’s really quite embarrassing.

Hey, hey, hey Mrs, shut up. Whoever you are, shut up. Shut up. Shut up. Now listen, when a man is talking do not interrupt.

Johnny needs a good kick in the dentures. What a wanker.

While Lydon is obnoxious from the get-go, the real unpleasantness begins at the 4:10 mark.
 

Posted by Marc Campbell
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04.10.2013
04:09 am
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Johnny Rotten reviews ‘Katy Perry: Part of Me’
03.21.2013
01:59 pm
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Johnny Rotten reviews the 2012 documentary Katy Perry: Part of Me for Fuse. As you’d imagine, there are some pretty funny moments. 

“Oh, Katy, my heart goes out to you. You poor thing, your dad’s a nutter! A skinhead priest!”

 

 
Cynical-C

Posted by Tara McGinley
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03.21.2013
01:59 pm
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Raw footage of John Lydon and Keith Levene at MTV interview, 1982
01.02.2013
10:49 am
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Fascinating unedited raw footage of a 1982 JJ Jackson interview of Public Image Ltd’s John Lydon and Keith Levene at MTV’s studio. Jackson’s questions are a lot better than you might expect them to be (he absolutely knew what he was talking about).

I’ve never seen Keith Levene more loquacious and animated in a vintage interview. He even talks briefly about his tenure in the Clash during the second part.

Lydon had just come off filming Corrupt with Harvey Keitel in Rome. Of course he tries to pull his patented obnoxious routine with Jackson, but the well-researched MTV VJ plays it cool and manages to get a good interview out of him.

At the beginning, and near the end, after a few minutes of silence, you can hear what they were talking about off-camera.
 

 
Part II is here.

Posted by Richard Metzger
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01.02.2013
10:49 am
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Johnny Rotten plays his own records on Capital Radio, 1977
12.11.2012
05:15 pm
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Recorded at a moment in time when the young Mr. Rotten was routinely getting his head kicked in by skinheads and hassled by the police, this is probably my single favorite bit of punk rock audio ephemera (actually, it’s a tie with the infamous Slits college radio interview, but that’s another blog post…).

What am I talking about? A guest appearance by Johnny Rotten on the Capital Radio program of deep-voiced DJ Tommy Vance. Rotten/Lydon was invited to play records from his own collection and talk about them. He comes across as whip-smart, honest and refreshingly free from much—if any—social programming and religious brainwashing. He discusses the Sex Pistols, Malcolm McClaren (he calls him the fifth member of the band), being educated in a Catholic school he despised and his passionate love of music. There’s no put-on here or any hint of the deliberate obnoxiousness of later years.

Where did you go to school?

[sighs] This poxy Roman Catholic thing. All they done was teach me religion. Didn’t give a damn about your education though. That’s not important is it? Just as long as you go out being a priest.

Which you haven’t become.

Well no. That kind of forcing ideas on you like when you don’t want to know is bound to get the opposite reaction. They don’t let you work it out for yourselves. They tell you you should like it. And that’s why I hate schools. You’re not given a choice. It’s not free.

It’s an inevitable question, and a corny question, but can you think of any better system of educating people?

No I can’t [laugh], I just know that one’s not right. I wouldn’t dare, it’s out of my depth, I have nothing to do with that side of things. I haven’t been to university and studied all the right attitudes, so I don’t know. No I haven’t.

[fades in Doctor Alimantado - ‘Born For A Purpose ‘]

This is it, ‘Born For A Purpose’, right? Now this record, just after I got my brains kicked out, I went home and I played it and there’s a verse which goes, ‘If you have no reason for living, don’t determine my life’. Because the same thing happened to him. He got run over because he was a dread. Very true.

The music he plays is a revelation.  Can, some rare soul, Tim Buckley, Peter Hammill (he accuses Bowie of copping the Van Der Graaf Generator front man’s moves), Captain Beefheart (he plays “The Blimp”!), Nico, John Cale and of course, lots of reggae. When Rotten plays the dub b-side by Culture (the track with the lopping bass, barking dogs, crying babies and blaring car horns) you can hear the blueprint for the PiL sound that would come along just a few months later.

It must be said that for a 20-year-old he’s got astonishingly good taste in music and for that time period? Please! This really is an incredible thing to listen to. For the musical education alone, it’s great, but listening to the thoughts of this controversial, brilliant young man at the height of powers is a sublime pleasure.

It even contains the radio commercials from the broadcast. This has been making the rounds for years, but this version is clean and in real stereo, the best I’ve ever heard.

A transcript of the interview and a track listing can be found here.
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.11.2012
05:15 pm
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A Pistol In The Dock: John Lydon on Judge Judy, 1997
12.04.2012
05:32 pm
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I did not know this existed, but I’m glad it does, as it has made my day a whole lot brighter!

in 1997, former Public Image Limited drummer Robert Williams brought an action against John Lydon for breach of contract and assault and battery. The suit got played out on daytime TV, in front of the nation, and the one and only Judge Judy. What the hell were they thinking?!

Lydon comes out of this looking good, despite being accused of head-butting Williams at a Japanese restaurant and firing him for no good reason, three days before an American tour. Williams protests that he did not want to share a room with two other musicians while on the tour, and thus was let go.

SPOILERS: Williams loses, and faces a stern telling off from Judy, who advises him that the music industry is full of strange characters unlike any other business, and that perhaps he is in the wrong trade.

Yeah, Judy doesn’t like WIlliams much, you can tell. It looks as if she takes a shine to Lydon though, despite having to calm his boisterousness by telling him to keep quiet on many occasions.

Perhaps this was the moment Lydon’s ambition as a TV presenter was born. Who knows? But it certainly deserves its place in his canon of classic television appearances.
 

 
Thanks Freddy!

Previously on Dangerous Minds:

John Lydon’s stance on drugs upsets Conservative politician on British TV

Life First, Money Second: John Lydon interview from 1990

Post-Pistols, pre PIL: John Lydon interview, 1978

Posted by Niall O'Conghaile
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12.04.2012
05:32 pm
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Riot at the Ritz: The infamous Public Image Ltd. ‘riot show’
08.12.2012
08:27 pm
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Although I was told by the guy who actually shot it himself that there was, in fact, a videotape of the legendary Public Image Ltd. “riot” show at New York’s Ritz nightclub in 1981, I’ve never seen it bootlegged anywhere. However there were at least a couple of different audio bootlegs of the show. The one I have is like the one pictured above, a 45 rpm record that came inside of a clear plastic sleeve. It’s chaotic, noisy and difficult to tell what’s going on, yet still really interesting.

The set up was simply that PiL were brought in to hastily replace Bow Wow Wow, who’d screwed over the concert promoters at the last minute. PiL, having no time to rehearse, offered to do a “video performance” using the club’s state of the art video projector, standing behind a screen mixing video, DJing with some live playing.

The following is a description of what actually happened that night, May 15, 1981, as told by Ed Carabello, who arranged the gig. The full article is at Perfect Sound Forever.

“So now it was PIL’s turn to go on. The crowd was really cranky and pissed by then, chanting ‘PIL, PIL, PIL!’ I was in the control booth with my headphones, nice and snug in there in the back of the club with a beautiful view of the audience and the stage: I felt like I was manning the Starship Enterprise. We felt that it would be appropriate to have a video of Lisa Yipp interviewing Keith and John in the trashcan she used for the show. Lisa gets on the headphones and says ‘I’m not going out there- they’re rowdy, they’re screaming!’ I told her ‘you’re a professional, go out there and do it.’ So one of the stage crew drags out the trash can she used for her show with her inside and with the lid on top. The audience looked at it like ‘what the hell’ and she pops out like Oscar the Grouch and says ‘HI, I’M LISA YAPP! I’M HERE TO TALK ABOUT PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED!’ So now the crowd’s really pissed and they start chanting louder. She starts to give an introduction about the band and we play this interview she did with Keith. In the interview, he’s saying ‘Rock and roll is dead. This is a new age of performance.’ The crowd had it by then. They turned on Lisa for everything that happened. They pelted her with beer bottles but Lisa was such a trooper that she kept going with her introduction. She fended off the bottles with the lid of the trash can like a gladiator shield. Then she says ‘AND HERE’S PUBLIC IMAGE LIMITED!’

The whole band’s behind the screen and Keith starts playing and the drummer’s playing this celtic rhythm to start the show. Then Keith starts playing the record ‘Flowers of Romance.’ He cranked it up and took all the equalization out of it- it sounded so cacaphonous. I started pulsating the parcan lights. It was really eerie and screechy. The crowd just loved it- they fell silent. You just saw the glow and the lights flashing. Keith’s guitar was feeding back, playing off the record that was on and John was just silent throughout this whole thing. He just stood next to Keith. You could only see the silhouettes of them and the projections of them on the screen. The crowd is just loving this, thinking ‘what a great introduction.’

The first song ends and John starts to talk to the audience for the first time. He says ‘sil-ly fuck-ing aud-ience, sil-ly fuck-ing aud-i-ence…’ He’s slowly taunting the audience. Now the crowd’s not quiet anymore. They start chanting ‘raise the screen, raise the screen, raise the screen!’ John’s never been one who likes to be told what to do so he’s chiding the audience. He says what fuckers they were to pay 12 dollars to see this, just taunting the audience. The more they say ‘raise the screen,’ he says ‘we’re not going to raise the fucking screen!’

So the band goes into another song that was this kind of improvisational kind of thing. It seemed to be directed by the drummer! John and Keith were just doing their thing. John made those sounds with his voice, almost like a yodelling type of thing. Keith is doing this screechy, primal sounding thing with his guitar, almost like a jazz number. They go through this and it’s a ten minute number. The crowd is kind of liking it but you could hear them add their two cents by syncopating the rhythm with ‘raise the screen! raise the screen!’ At the end of this, John is really being abusive. So the audience starts pelting the screen with beer bottles. Even in the balconies, they were throwing bottles and some of it was hitting the audience down below. The more that they threw bottles, the more that John would chide them.

The manager of the Ritz comes to me then as I’m the only member of the band that was accessible- everyone else is behind the screen. Jerry says ‘you gotta raise the screen! There’s a riot happening right before our eyes!’ I felt like Nero watching Rome burn, seeing these bottles all over and I never realized how abusive John was to his audience. So I tell Jerry ‘No, I’m not raising it. You should have advertised and said that this wasn’t a concert. It’s a performance art show. That is what it is, that’s what they paid for and that’s what we’re putting on.’ I was guarding the remote control switch, not letting anyone touch it. Jerry kept yelling at me to raise it and I’d yell at him that I wasn’t going to do it.

Then Jerry turns to the crowd and sees something going on as they let out a collective ‘aaah.’ The front of the crowd started pulling on the tarp and I start getting scared because the instruments and amplifier were moving forward like they were going to go into the audience. So Jerry says ‘Are you crazy? Look at that!’ I said ‘you’re probably right.’ So I raised the screen just a little bit, enough to put on the parcans full blast so that we’re blinding the audience with light. For a minute, they shrink back from this huge flash of light. It looked like the screen from ‘Wizard of Oz’ where everyone sees the magical workings of the Wizard, like ‘pay no attention to the PIL behind the screen!’

 
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After the jump, listen to audio recordings of what happened during this infamous performance…

READ ON
Posted by Richard Metzger
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08.12.2012
08:27 pm
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